H. G. Wells and the Natural World

Aug13

Emily Alder looks at the his early scientific romances and the mastery of nature

H. G. Wells’s scientific romances are best known for
their fictional commentaries on the state of Western, human society and its
possible futures. Wells is not a ‘nature writer’ in the way that some of his
contemporaries like Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson were. Nevertheless, the
natural world, in the forms of landscapes, animals and plants, pervades a great
many of his novels and short stories. A closer look at Wells’s representations
of nature reveals how, as in so many other ways, his enduring and prescient fictions
are in dialogue with the prevailing beliefs and debates of his day about the
natural world and human relationships with it.

Wells
had little time for constructions of nature as divinely created and ordered, or
for Romantic
ideas of nature as moral redemption, balm for the soul, or sanctuary
from industrialisation. He had turned more or less completely from his
conventional Christian upbringing upon gaining a scientific
education and became a committed Darwinist, understanding the
universe as thoroughly material and governed by inevitable processes such as natural
selection and the laws of thermodynamics.
As shown by novels like The Time
Machine (1895) with its narrative of human degenerative
evolution into two inferior subspecies and ultimately extinction, human beings
were just as much subject to these rules as any other living species.

The
Time Machine follows
evolutionary and thermodynamic logic to bleak conclusions: the gradual
devolution and simplification of animal life and the heat-death of the solar
system. By conceiving humanity as subjugated to natural processes, Wells ran
counter to some more popular ways of thinking. For many, the sophisticated
state of Victorian civilisation, with its advanced communication and industrial
technologies, science, art, and Empire, showed that people had landscapes and
natural resources under control and put to good use. Conceptions of human
mastery over nature in Western thought stretch back at least to Francis
Bacon, further defined along Cartesian
lines dividing mind from body, rationality from instinct, human from
animal, culture from nature, civilised from savage. But Wells’s early
scientific romances tend to overturn such assumptions of social and
intellectual progress or human superiority over nature.

The War of
the Worlds(1898), for example, begins with an
image of humanity as a collection of microbes, watched by the alien Martians
‘almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient
creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water’. This opening gives a
reader due warning, perhaps, of a story that relentlessly crushes all examples
of British human ego. The heart of the British Empire is invaded, its advanced
weaponry is useless, religious faith is powerless, and people themselves find
they are no different to other animals in the Martians’ eyes. The narrator
compares himself to a rabbit; he experiences ‘a sense of dethronement, a
persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals,
under the Martian heel’. Lastly, the final insult comes in the form of victory
over the Martians of Terran bacteria. In war as in peace, humanity relies for
survival on these most humble and simple of organisms.

By
the time of The War of the Worlds, Wells had already dwelt frequently on
these themes. In The Island of
Doctor Moreau(1897), similarly, narrator Prendick must
confront his similarity, not his superiority, to the Beast People created by
Moreau, recognising both the humanity in them and the animalism in himself.
Wells’s first full-length novel, The Time Machine, explicitly tackles
questions of human mastery over nature: where it might lead, and its limits.

When
the Time Traveller arrives in the year 802701, he initially believes he has
stumbled into a utopia, an impression created not least by the marvellous
garden in which the childlike Eloi live: ‘everywhere were fruits and sweet and
delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither’. He
attributes this paradise to agricultural and horticultural developments; human
science will evidently enable manipulation of the natural world at will. In the
future of his own time, he perceives, ‘one triumph of a united humanity over
Nature had followed another’. Global cooperation will set the progress of civilisation
on an upward trajectory: The
whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move
faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and
carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit
our human needs.

The
Time Traveller expresses his confidence that mastering nature in support of
human ends is possible and desirable; nature, here, is a resource for human
use, and perfect control of it is a utopian aim. Yet
Wells leaves clues in the text that hint at the Time Traveller’s mistake;
earlier in the same chapter, his very first glimpse of the Eloi world is
of ‘a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet
weedless garden’. At some point, humans have ceased to tend their subjugated
environment; the plants grow in a heedless tangle. Humanity had ‘used all its
abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived’, and ‘a perfect
conquest of Nature’ led to feeble adaptations to an easy life instead of an
energetic struggle for improvements. In this way, The Time Machine
critiques and corrects what Wells saw as the flaws in utopian writing that
presented people living in a perpetual harmony with nature, which in fact is
always changing: the beautiful, static worlds of William Morris’s News from
Nowhere: an epoch of rest (1890) and Hudson’s A Crystal Age
(1887) seemed to ignore time’s arrow, the inescapable logic of evolutionary
adaptation, and the entropic trend of the second law of thermodynamics.
Humanity – like all of nature – disregarded these laws at its peril.

However,
humanity’s moral and intellectual ingenuity might save it yet. Wells’s own
concept of utopia, outlined at length a few years later in A Modern
Utopia (1905), is ‘kinetic’, recognising the dynamic, changing
nature of people and their environments. Wells was a disciple of naturalist T.
H. Huxley, who argued inEvolution and
Ethics (1893) that humanity had the capacity to resist the ‘cosmic process'
- that is, evolutionary mechanisms – and direct its future according to an
‘ethical process’. ‘Intelligence and will’, Huxley wrote, ‘guided by sound
principles of investigation, and organised in common effort, may modify the
conditions of existence’. Over time, ‘cosmic nature’ could be replaced by
‘ethical nature’; the most powerful and overarching natural laws losing their
sway in the face of the emergence of an ethical, scientific, and cooperative
humanity. The Time Machine,
accordingly, ends on a note of hope that humankind could live differently and
avoid the bleak future witnessed by the Time Traveller, while Wells’s Modern
Utopia is organised along Huxley’s ethical, cooperatives lines against the
cosmic process: 'man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature' and
'in the Modern Utopia he will have set himself to change the ancient law.' it
is judiciously managed by a scientific elite, the samurai, while an advocate of
a ‘Return to Nature’ is mocked as a ‘purveyor of absurdities’.

These
early works offer a snapshot of ideas about social organisation and humanity's
relationships with its environments to which Wells would regularly return in later
writing. They retain considerable contemporary relevance in a modern world strongly
inflected by instrumental attitudes to nature, problems of a changing
environment, and social injustices. Wells's insights that humanity must accept
the strength of natural laws, but use our unique abilities and control of
resources for the benefit of the many rather than the few, remain important,
while his eloquent stories still speak to us about our world, our place in
nature, and our choices.

Dr
Emily Alder is a lecturer
in Literature and Culture at the School
of Arts & Creative Industries, Edinburgh
Napier University